Amid all the obituaries for local papers, which I devoutly hope are premature, I've been having a look at the Middlesbrough Gazette's pioneering Communities Live website, which divides Teesside into its 23 postcodes, each with an online set of pages.

They are super-local all right, in the best sense of tiny detail. If you want to know the latest target for the clean-up volunteers at Flatts Lane in Easton and Normanby, just click once for the answer: three raised flower beds next to the exercise frames which have got overrun by wicker grass.

The web also beats paper hands down when it comes to archiving, something which sends me on trawls through our wheelie bin for old copies of the Wharfedale and Airedale Gazette. If you can't remember the recipe that won the Goldleaf community cafe at Newtown first prize in a national Fairtrade competition, there it is on page 113 of the TS19 website for Elm Tree, Fairfield and Hardwick: vegetable biryani with mango chutney.

Initially, I was a bit sceptical about the blogging and interactive side of things. I mean, schoolboy Jacob of Acklam and Linthorpe chats away happily about exams, ingeniously checking what readers make of the question: "Find: x²+ 7x + 6 = 0. (Sorry, that sort of thing became Greek to me after I just scraped through Elementary Maths in 1966). But look at the commendably honest table of "Most Commented On" articles in that patch, TS5. There are 10 in the table and in every case the number of comments is nil.

Not so fast, though. In TS17, Ingleby Barwick and Thornaby, there's the sort of piece local papers excel at, about the tragic death of a young father in an industrial accident at Corus steelworks. That has already attracted 179 responses including this one: "You pass faces going into Tesco and you bump into people every day taking and picking up your kids at their school. We take for granted how fair and kind people can be every single day and how important it is to acknowledge others. I know this Dad well. I recognised him every day I saw him. Whether it was a smile and a hello or him opening the school door, he was always nice."

Given the damage done by most media's inevitable concentration on exceptional, and therefore mostly bad, news, this sort of innovation is terrific.

*******

Talking of the media's effect, you can't move for politicians these days on Dewsbury Moor, the former home of Karen Matthews who is now in prison for the fake kidnapping of her daughter Shannon. The estate has become the modern equivalent of Margaret Mead's Samoa, and the Dewsbury Reporter suggests that residents are getting a bit fed up with it.

Greta Garbo-like, Julie Bushby of the Tenants and Residents' Association is now asking everyone to leave the place alone, after the pensions secretary James Purnell chose the place to launch a national policy on alcohol abuse. Others on their way include David Cameron, although his visit is intended to be media-free. What riles the likes of Bushby is the way that the Moor and the Matthewses never seem to get disentangled.

"Why keep bringing Shannon Matthews into it?" she says of Purnell's visit. "Four times in one conversation she was mentioned."

There's a lot else to discover about Dewsbury Moor: Bushby's pet ducks for instance, which were typically curious about myself and photographer Chris Thomond when we visited her back garden last year.

And what about another resident who's never mentioned? Charlotte Brontë was a teacher in Dewsbury Moor in 1837 at Heald's House, which still stands in the grounds of Dewsbury district hospital. Worth a peek.

*******

Whoops. As Yakub Qureshi tells us in the Manchester Evening News, it "was perhaps not the best place for a teacher to have a little car trouble." When students arrived at Broadoak high school in Partington, that strange island in the flatlands west of Manchester's ring road, they found a teacher's Honda hatchback "suspiciously close to a car-shaped hole in the canteen wall".

All the media's modern weaponry of online video is deployed to give quite an interesting potential lesson on the laws of physics, once the damage is repaired and the teacher, who was not injured, gets over her red face and shock.

Headteacher Andy Griffin explains: "She put her foot on the accelerator rather than the brake", or as Qureshi puts it: "got in a muddle with her ABCs: accelerator, brake and clutch."

The piece notes that Broadoak is one of the country's most-improved schools in the latest league tables. If unexpected but memorable episodes like this continue, so will the improvement. But the canteen is going to be shut for a while.

*******

Sad news from the Liverpool Daily Post: there's been another suspected arson attack on the Pleasureland theme park at Southport. Fun parks are something the north does really well, and though the old River Caves at Pleasureland – the victim of the latest fire – are no longer in use, they date back to the 1920s and have given millions of punters much fun.

As local resident Dave Thackeray tells the Post: "The River Caves was one of my most-loved rides as a child. I had my first kiss there when I was 14."

The park's temporary operator, Dreamstorm, is getting fed up, although in the longer term the site is due for an £80m overhaul after Sefton council bought it for £7.25m last year.

At least the River Caves went out in appropriate style. Hordes of onlookers gathered on Southport sea wall to watch 10 fire crews tackle vast flames and billowing clouds of smoke. They could even see it from the other side of the Ribble estuary and in deadly rival Blackpool.

*******

Like the Middlesbrough Gazette, the Huddersfield Examiner is an innovative paper, but half the interest in reading its special Huddersfield Student section is the technological challenge. The pages come up in an embedded form which has you scooting the cursor around as the text and pictures move too, like one of those online games where you scare pixelly cockroaches off your screen with the cursor.

Trying out all the weird forms of layout and zooming in and out with the magnifying glass became an end in itself for me, but the stories are interesting too when they finally become legible.

I especially liked the one about prankster Will Luton, a computer design student at Huddersfield Uni who made some naughty posters to back his bid for power and the editorship of the student newspaper. These led to an angry reaction from staff including "a strongly worded message on his parents' Ansafone in Bristol."

Will is undaunted and far from dropping his campaign invoked the university's complaints procedure. His aims rather sweetly include a written apology to his mother, who he claims suffered stress from getting the tinny, recorded voice of authority on the telephone.

*******

Martin Wainwright recommends … Celebrate St George's Day – today – by visiting two of the top three places in a survey of England's most English Towns by the information website locallife.co.uk. They are Scarborough, which won easily and scarcely needs any help to encourage visitors for a grand day out, and less predictably, Bradford, where you can have a marvellous time – the National Media Museum, Brontë Haworth, Ilkley Moor, best curries in Britain.

The rankings are based on local population ratio to five ancient British institutions: fish and chip shops, cricket clubs, tearooms, Morris dancers and holiday camps. Bradford ranks third in the country. Yo!

Finally, start slimming now if you plan to enter the second World Black Pudding Eating Contest in Bury over the bank holiday weekend. The Bury Times has the details of this ancient-sounding northern event, which is actually only in its second year. The current champion, Mary Brimelow, managed 10 within the permitted hour. One other competitor last year ate 11 but fell foul of the rule which disqualifies anyone who sicks the blood and gutsy mixture back up.

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About this article

The Northerner: Postcode savvy with a little help from the web

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 13.37 EDT on Thursday 23 April 2009.
It was last modified at 13.37 EDT on Thursday 23 April 2009.
It was first published at 08.13 EDT on Thursday 23 April 2009.